Jennifer Garner, Matthew McConaughey Talk ‘Girlfriends Past’ Action

It’s not unusual to catch both [movieperson id="76079"]Jennifer Garner[/movieperson] and [movieperson id="164796"]Matthew McConaughey[/movieperson] jumping from action films to romantic comedies and back again. She has moved deftly from episodes of “Alias” and stunt-heavy work in the “Daredevil”/ “Elektra” franchise to rom-com fare in “Catch and Release” and “13 Going on 30,” while he’s taken parts in “Sahara” and “Reign of Fire” but remained a perennial head-turner in films like “Failure to Launch” and “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days.” Now, both stars come together in [url id="http://www.mtv.com/movies/movie/302853/moviemain.jhtml"]“Ghosts of Girlfriends Past,”[/url] a film that McConaughey suggests treads a finer line between genres than you might expect.

“She’s athletic and I’m athletic,” McConaughey told MTV News, seated next to his co-star, “so we’ve got a lot of physical comedy in this thing, and what’s fun about that is you have to do it like you’re doing an action movie.”

Though the film boasts quite a bit of practical stunt work, not the least of which includes a downhill car chase through a snowy forest and an intricate cake-balancing act, Garner said that the core approach to any genre is more or less the same and that any role requires a tremendous amount of physical ability.

“You have to use your whole body to act out the scenes,” she said, pointing out that subtlety in a dramatic situation can be a bigger challenge than the most intense fight scene.

“Spatial sense is a big thing,” McConaughey said of some of the film’s more physically demanding slapstick moments. “If you’re early, there’s too big of a gap and you’ve got to shoot it again. If you’re late, you’ve lost the prop and that’s where you actually hit the person. Sometimes you go too far. I’ve done that too.”

Thankfully, Garner found herself on less intense terms with the other actors, reuniting with her old friend Christa B. Allen, who played Garner’s younger self in “13 Going on 30″ and whom she recommended for a similar role in “Ghosts.”

But for McConaughey, the biggest highlight of production was playing misguided love-’em-and-leave-’em ladies’ man Connor Mead.

“That was one of the funnest parts of this,” he said. “For the first third of the movie, I got to not hold back in having as much confidence with this guy as I could — as being the pathetic guy that he is, the rakish guy that he is. It’s fun to go that far.”